A coal-chemical-recovery coke oven as described on pages 7-66 of MECHANICAL ENGINEERS HANDBOOK (McGraw Hill:1958) is usually constituted as a battery formed of a horizontal row of vertically extending coking chambers. Each such chamber is normally around 40 feet long, 12 feet high and 15 inches wide, tapering approximately 3 inches from end to end. Each such chamber holds a charge of approximately 15 tons of coal. Flues between adjacent coking chambers are heated to approximately 2000.degree. C. to carbonize the coal within the chamber or retort.
Once the coal within each charged chamber has been fully carbonized, doors are removed at both ends and the coke charge is pushed horizontally out of the oven by a ram of a pusher machine.
The coking chambers are usually filled through their tops, as described in our above-cited patent applications. The coke is usually pushed out into a quenching wagon and a hood or the like is fitted over the side of the arrangement in order to catch the air/gas/dust mixture that blows out of the coking chamber when it is open. Thus the filling wagon usually rides on rails above the coking battery, the pusher and door opener and other devices ride on tracks or rails next to the chambers, and the quenching wagon rides next to and below the battery so that the coke mass pushed out of the chambers will fall into it.
The various devices for removing the side doors of the coke battery, cleaning these doors and cleaning off the door frames, so that the doors can be fitted tightly back in place once the chamber is empty to prevent leakage during the next coking operation, usually ride on a frame alonside the coke battery. The individual devices are displaceable orthogonally on the frames relative to the longitudinal displacement direction, which is also the lengthwise direction of the coking battery. See German Auslegeschrift No. 1,225,142. The various devices are also pivotally on this frame.
The disadvantage of such an arrangement is that the considerable mass of this movable-frame assembly must be exactly displaced so as to align the various devices precisely with the individual coking chambers. Thus it is necessary to provide a very slowly operating and exactly controlled drive so that preparing each chamber for emptying and resealing it is a lengthy operation.